by George Moore
The grey sky has blown over these people for so many generations that it has left them bare as the hills. A playhouse for these people! What defiance of nature’s law! And watching the shapely sods of turf melting into white ash I thought of the dim people building the playhouse, obedient to the priest, unsuspicious of a new idea. A playhouse must have seemed to them as useless as a road that leads nowhere. The priest told them that people would come to see the play; but the idea of pleasure did not find a way into their minds. The playhouse had fallen!
I piled more turf on the fire; the priest did not return, and the moaning of the wind put strange fancies into my head. My driver had spoken of a small white thing gliding along the road, and I regretted I had not asked him more about the apparition, if it were an apparition. A little later I wondered why the priest knitted. “His room is lined with books. He does not read, he knits, — a strange occupation. He never talks about books.”
I crossed the room to investigate the mystery, and I discovered a heap of woollen stockings. “All these he has knitted. But some strange story hangs about him,” I said; and I lay awake a long while thinking of the people I should met on the morrow.
And never shall I forget the spectacle. There are degrees in poverty, and I remember two men: their feet were bare, and their shirts were so torn that the curling breast hair was uncovered. They wore brown beards, and their skin was yellow with famine, and one of them cried out: “The white sun of heaven does not shine upon two poorer men than upon this man and myself.” After the meeting they followed us, and the poor people seemed to me strangely anxious to tell of their condition. There were some women among them; they were kept back by the men, and they quarrelled among themselves, disputing who should talk to me; they had seen no one except each other for a long time, and I feared their interest in the looms was a conversational interest — it amused them to talk.
The priest brought a bundle of clothes out of the house, and when the distribution was finished, I asked him to come for a walk up the hill and show me the playhouse.
Again he hesitated, and I said, “You must come, Father MacTurnan, for a walk. You must forget the misfortunes of those people for a while.” He yielded, and we spoke of the excellence of the road, and he told me that when he had conceived the idea of a playhouse he had arranged with the inspector that the road should go to the top of the hill.
“It will not make much difference,” he said, “for if there is ever a harbour made the road can be carried over the hill right down to the sea, and the hill, as you say, is not a very steep one.”
“There must be a fine view from the hill-top, and no doubt you often go there to read your breviary.”
“During the building of the playhouse I often used to be up here, and during the rehearsals I was here every day.”
I noticed that the tone of his voice never altered.
A grey, shallow sea had slowly eaten away the rotten land, and the embay was formed by two low headlands hardly showing above the water at high tide.
“I thought once,” said the priest, “that if the play were a great success a line of flat-bottomed steamers might be built.”
“Pleasant dreams,” I said to myself, “and he sitting here in the quiet evenings, reading his breviary, dreaming of a line of steamships crowded with visitors. He has been reading about the Oberammergau performances.” And I spoke about these performances, agreeing with him that no one would have dared to predict that visitors would come from all sides of Europe to see a few peasants performing a miracle play in the Tyrol.
“Come,” I said, “into the playhouse. Let me see how you built it.”
The building was finished! The walls and the roof were finished, and a stage had been erected at the end of the building. But half a wall and some of the roof had fallen upon it, and the rubble had not been cleared away.
“It would not cost many pounds to repair the damage,” I said. “And having gone so far, you should give the play a chance.”
I was anxious to hear if he had discovered any aptitude for acting among the girls and the boys who lived in the cabins.
“I think,” said the priest, “that the play would have been very fairly acted, and I think that, with a little practice we might have done as well as they did at Oberammergau.”
But he was more willing to discuss the play that he had chosen than the talents of those who were going to perform it, and he told me that it had been written in the fourteenth century in Latin, and that he himself had translated it into Irish.
“I wonder if it would have been possible to organise an excursion from Dublin. If the performance had been judiciously advertised— ‘Oberammergau in the West.’”
“I used to think,” said he, “it is eight miles from Rathowen, and the road is a bad one, and when they got here there would be no place for them to stay; they would have to go all the way back again, and that would be sixteen miles.”
“Yet it was as well to build this playhouse as to make a useless road — a road leading nowhere. While they were building this playhouse they thought they were accomplishing something. Never before did the poor people do anything, except for bare life. Do you know, Father MacTurnan, your playhouse touches me to the heart?” and I turned and looked.
“Once Pleasure hovered over your parish, but the bird did not alight! Let me start a subscription for you in Dublin!”
“I don’t think,” said the priest, “that it would be possible—”
“Not for me to get fifty pounds?”
“Yes,” he said, “you might get the money, but I don’t think we could ever get up a performance of the play.”
“And why not?” I said.
“You see, the wind came and blew down the wall, and I think they look upon that wind as a manifestation of God’s disapproval. The people are very pious, and looking back I think they felt that the time they spent in rehearsing might have been better spent. The idea of amusement shocks those who are not accustomed to the idea. The playhouse disturbed them in their ideas. They hear Mass on Sundays, and there are the Sacraments, and they remember that they have to die. It used to seem to me a very sad thing to see all the people going to America; it seemed to me the saddest thing in the world to see the poor Celt disappear in America, leaving his own country, leaving his language, and very often his religion.”
“And does it no longer seem to you sad that such a thing should happen?”
“No, not if it is the will of God. God has specially chosen the Irish race to convert the world, no race has provided so many missionaries, no race has preached the gospel more frequently to the heathen; and once we realise that we have to die, and very soon, and that the Catholic Church is the only true church, our ideas about race and nationality fade from us. They come to seem very trite and foolish. We are here, not to make life successful and triumphant, but to gain heaven. That is the truth, and it is to the honour of the Irish people that they have been selected by God to preach the truth, even though they lose their nationality in preaching it. I do not expect you to accept these opinions. I know that you think very differently, but living here I have learned to acquiesce in the will of God.”
The priest stopped speaking suddenly, like one ashamed of having expressed himself too openly, and soon after we were met by a number of peasants, and the priest’s attention was engaged; the inspector of the relief works had to speak to him; and I did not see him again until dinner-time.
“You have given them hope,” he said.
This was gratifying to hear, and the priest sat listening while I told him of the looms already established in different parts of the country. We talked about half an hour, and then, like one who suddenly remembers, the priest got up and fetched his knitting.
“Do you knit every evening?”
“I have got into the way of knitting lately; it passes the time.”
“But do you never read?” I asked, and looked towards the book-shelves.
“I used to read a great deal.
But there wasn’t a woman in the parish that could turn a heel properly, so that I had to learn to knit.”
“Do you like knitting better than reading?” I asked, feeling ashamed of my curiosity.
“I have constantly to attend sick-calls, and if one is absorbed in a book one experiences a certain reluctance in putting it aside.”
“The people are very inconsiderate. Now, why did that man put off coming to fetch you till eleven o’clock last night? He knew his wife was ill.”
“Sometimes one is apt to think them inconsiderate.”
“The two volumes of miracle plays!”
“Yes, and that’s another danger, a book puts all kinds of ideas and notions into one’s head. The idea of that playhouse came out of those books.”
“But,” I said, “you do not think that God sent the storm because He did not wish a play to be performed.”
“One cannot judge God’s designs. Whether God sent the storm or whether it was accident must remain a matter for conjecture, but it is not a matter of conjecture that one is doing certain good by devoting one’s self to one’s daily task, getting the Government to start new relief works, establishing schools for weaving — the people are entirely dependent upon me, and when I am attending to their wants I know I’m doing right. All the other is conjecture.”
The priest asked for further information regarding our system of payments, and I answered eagerly. I had begun to feel my curiosity to be disgraceful, and it was unnecessary, — my driver would tell me to-morrow why the playhouse had been abandoned.
I relied on him to tell me; he was one of those who had the faculty for hearing things: he had heard that I had been up the hill with the priest to see the playhouse; he knew all about my walk with the priest, and was soon telling me that it was the curse of the Widow Sheridan that had brought down the wind that had wrecked the playhouse. For it was her daughter that the priest had chosen to play the part of Good Deeds in the miracle play. And the story the driver told me seemed true to the ideas of the primitive people who lived in the waste, and of the waste itself. The girl had been led astray one evening returning from rehearsal, — in the words of my car-driver, “She had been ‘wake’ going home one evening, and when the signs of her ‘weakness’ began to show upon her, her mother took the halter off the cow and tied the girl to the wall and kept her there until the child was born. And Mrs. Sheridan put a piece of string round its throat and buried it one night near the playhouse. And it was three nights after that the storm rose, and the child was seen pulling the thatch out of the roof.”
“But, did she murder the child?”
“Sorra wan of me knows. She sent for the priest when she was dying, and told him what she had done.”
“But the priest would not reveal what he heard in the confession?” I said.
“Mrs. Sheridan didn’t die that night, not till the end of the week; and the neighbours heard her talking about the child that she buried, and then they all knew what the white thing was that had been seen by the roadside. And the night that the priest left her he saw the white thing standing in front of him; and if he hadn’t been a priest he would have dropped down dead. But he knew well enough that it was the unbaptised child, and he took some water from the bog-hole and dashed it over it, saying, “I baptise thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.”
The driver told his story like one saying his prayers, and he seemed to have forgotten that he had a listener.
“And the ghost hasn’t been seen again?” I said.
“No, not that I know of.”
“I don’t like your story,” I said. “I like the story about Julia Cahill better.”
“Well, they’re both true; one’s as true as the other; and Julia and Margaret are in America. Once a woman is wake she must go to America.”
“It must have been a great shock to the priest.”
“Faith it was, sir, to meet an unbaptised child on the roadside, and the child the only bastard that was ever born in the parish, — so Tom Mulhare says, and he’s the oldest man in the county of Mayo.”
“It was altogether a very queer idea, this playhouse.”
“It was indeed, sir, a queer idea; but you see he’s a queer man. He has been always thinking of something to do good; and it is said that he thinks too much. Father James is a very queer man, your honour.”
At the end of a long silence, interrupted now and then by the melancholy cry with which he encouraged his horse, he began another story, how Father James MacTurnan had written to the Pope asking that the priests might marry, “so afeard was he that the Catholics were going to America and the country would become Protestant. And there’s James Murdoch’s cabin, and he is the man that got the five pounds that the bishop gave Father James to buy a pig.” And when I asked him how he knew all these things, he said, “There isn’t many days in the year that the old grey horse and myself don’t do five-and-twenty miles, and I’m often in and out of Rathowen.”
“There is no doubt,” I said to myself, “that this car-driver is the legitimate descendant of the ancient bards.”
THE WEDDING-GOWN
IT WAS SAID, but with what truth I cannot say, that the Roche property had been owned by the O’Dwyers many years ago, several generations past, sometime in the eighteenth century. Only a faint legend of this ownership remained; only once had young Mr. Roche heard of it, and it was from his mother he had heard it; among the country people it was forgotten. His mother had told him that his great-great-grandfather, who had made large sums of money abroad, had increased his property by purchase from the O’Dwyers, who then owned, as well as farmed, the hillside on which the Big House stood. The O’Dwyers themselves had forgotten that they were once much greater people than they now were, but the master never spoke to them without remembering it, for though they only thought of themselves as small farmers, dependents on the squire, every one of them, boys and girls alike, retained an air of high birth, which at the first glance distinguished them from the other tenants of the estate. Though they were not aware of it, some sense of their remote origin must have survived in them, and I think that in a still more obscure way some sense of it survived in the country side, for the villagers did not think worse of the O’Dwyers because they kept themselves aloof from the pleasures of the village and its squabbles. The O’Dwyers kept themselves apart from their fellows without any show of pride, without wounding anyone’s feelings.
The head of the family was a man of forty, and he was the trusted servant, almost the friend, of the young master, he was his bailiff and his steward, and he lived in a pretty cottage by the edge of the lake. O’Dwyer’s aunts, they were old women, of sixty-eight and seventy, lived in the Big House, the elder had been cook, and the younger housemaid, and both were now past their work, and they lived full of gratitude to the young master, to whom they thought they owed a great deal. He believed the debt to be all on his side, and when he was away he often thought of them, and when he returned home he went to greet them as he might go to the members of his own family. The family of the O’Dwyer’s was long lived, and Betty and Mary had a sister far older than themselves, Margaret Kirwin, “Granny Kirwin,” as she was called, and she lived in the cottage by the lake with her nephew, Alec O’Dwyer. She was over eighty, it was said that she was nearly ninety, but her age was not known exactly. Mary O’Dwyer said that Margaret was nearly twenty years older than she, but neither Betty nor Mary remembered the exact date of their sister’s birth. They did not know much about her, for though she was their sister, she was almost a stranger to them. She had married when she was sixteen, and had gone away to another part of the country, and they had hardly heard of her for thirty years. It was said that she had been a very pretty girl, and that many men had been in love with her, and it was known for certain that she had gone away with the son of the game keeper of the grandfather of the present Mr. Roche, so you can understand what a very long while ago it was, and how little of the story of her life had c
ome to the knowledge of those living now.
It was certainly sixty years since she had gone away with this young man; she had lived with him in Meath for some years, nobody knew exactly how many years, maybe some nine or ten years, and then he had died suddenly, and his death, it appears, had taken away from her some part of her reason. It was known for certain that she left Meath after his death, and had remained away many years. She had returned to Meath about twenty years ago, though not to the place she had lived in before. Some said she had experienced misfortunes so great that they had unsettled her mind. She herself had forgotten her story, and one day news had come to Galway — news, but it was sad news, that she was living in some very poor cottage on the edge of Navan town, where her strange behaviour and her strange life had made a scandal of her. The priest had to inquire out her relations, and it took him some time to do this, for the old woman’s answers were incoherent, but he at length discovered she came from Galway, and he had written to the O’Dwyers. And immediately on receiving the priest’s letter, Alec sent his wife to Navan, and she had come back with the old woman.
